Monica

It figures. Yesterday I saw that one of Amazon's affiliates had the second season of B5 for $50 (which is about half of the list price, though copies are easy to find at about $70). So I ordered it. An hour later another affiliate showed up with it for $40. Oh well. Then today another affiliate showed up with it for $26! But I've already ordered it, so too late now. And the memories of chasing the best price and nearly getting burned through half.com are still fresh, so I'm not going to feel too bad about missing out on the $26 copy. (They all claim to be new copies, by the way.)

We're most of the way through the first season. Tonight we watched "Grail" and "Eyes", along with the JMS commentary on "Signs and Portents".

Last night lefkowitzga came over and we traded Hebrew tutoring for illunination tutoring. It was fun! She has a good hand for painting, too. (I don't, especially. I'm pretty good at design, but my implementation has always been so-so.)

My neice is graduating from high school next month. I wonder what an appropriate gift is. She's been pestering her mother for a laptop computer, which is way beyond her mother's means. She's not going to get it from me, either, but she hasn't dropped any smaller hints. (I was really thinking closer to $100 than the $1000+ that would be required to fulfill that wish...) I don't like giving gift certificates, but that might be the best move. When all else fails, feed the book habit. :-)

Sunday lunch with Ralph and Lori was fun. Deanna and Eli were in town for Carnival, and Carl came, and two new people, and all of the regulars. We had 14 people in all, with a huge bowl of pasta with veggies and chicken and a truly massive strawberry-rhubarb pie. Everything was yummy and the company was good.

We had to leave a little early because we had errands to run. First up was a trip to Home Depot, where we stared at things in the plumbing aisle and tried to guess what part we needed to replace in a broken toilet. A helpful employee suggested a 99-cent part, which turned out to be right. Dani tried to pattern-match from the other two toilets in the house, but the innards of all of them are different. Meanwhile, I tried to apply logic, which only gets you so far. (My logic appears to have been correct if we were willing to set aside a part. But finishing a repair job with parts left over, other than the ones you replaced, is always a little suspicious.) Eventually we made what turned out to be a simple repair and all was fine. Yay us -- not completely repair-impaired. :-)

Then it was on to the taxes. Dani had already done most of the data entry, so this consisted of stepping through the interview in TurboTax so I could check his work and we could both see each question one more time. This caught another $1500 in deductions; I'm more anal-retentive than he is about such things. We ended up owing an acceptable amount of money, which means our withholdings are fine and we don't need to muck with them. (I don't want a tax refund; I want to owe. A refund means I made an interest-free loan to the government.)

We needed a few things from the grocery store. We had tried to stop on the way home from Home Depot, but the lot was completely full and we decided that was a bad sign. Later was much better. This is not the store I usually go to, so after picking up a bag of apples I began looking around for walnuts (which are near the produce in my regular store). Dani pointed to the rack immediately above the bags of apples, which was full of bags of walnuts. I guess the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle knows its customer base. :-) (Apples and walnuts are the main ingredients in charoset, which is a food needed for the seder. This is, in fact, exactly why we were buying these particular ingredients.)

In around all of this was getting the kitchen ready for Pesach. In the morning I had cleared out most of the remaining chametz that wasn't going to be in closed cabinets for the week. I brought the tubs of other dishes and utensils up from the basement, but won't open them until the rest of the cleaning is done. I kashered the things I need to switch over; I think next year I will buy Pesach flatware, because this is a nuissance and you can get flatware pretty cheaply these days. I've cleaned some of the relevant surfaces; the cleaning lady is coming today to do the rest, including scrubbing the oven and stove-top. Then tonight I can finish up. (The cleaning lady will also take care of the dining room and living room. We don't bring food into other rooms, so I don't have to do anything there. And since I would never eat crumbs off my floors or out of the spaces under the stove burners, I do not feel a burning need to do more than ordinary levels of cleaning there.)

On Wednesday we drive to Toronto. First seder is at Dani's mother's apartment. The second is at Debby and Tucker's, where we're staying. (Debby is Dani's sister.) So I imagine that we'll spend a chunk of Thursday helping with cooking, which is good -- I can feel useful, as opposed to just showing up in time for the food. :-) We're supposed to bring charoset for both seders, so I guess we'll make that Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. It doesn't take long, but I don't want to try to make it at the other end lest we get held up in traffic or something.

Dani and I have been (slowly) working our way through the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD. We may have to pick up the pace; I just noticed that the second season is being released at the end of April. :-) (Of course, we don't have to watch everything immediately, and we will be distracted by West Wing around then...)

Dani moved the SCSI card to my current computer (its third host machine), so I have access to my scanner again. During the software installation I saw pop-up hype along the lines of "take advantage of the full power of Windows 95". I had forgotten that this software is that old. I'm just glad it still works; I gather that a lot of 95/98 code stopped working on 2k.

Win 2k couldn't correctly detect the SCSI drivers on the CD. I had to run the setup program from the CD myself. That was surprising.

This afternoon lyev came by to drop off some "Dragon" magazines (he's cleaning out his house and I expressed interest). We chatted for a while about music, dancing, gaming, and assorted other stuff. He's a neat person; I should spend more time talking with him.

The cable guy also came today to try to figure out why we have selective, sporadic, bad reception. It's a recent problem, since the digital-cable experiment, and it's particularly bad on UPN. Fortunately, I was able to demonstrate the problem to him live on one channel and via videotape on another (different problem). How do you schedule a service call for an intermittent problem? He found the culprit, a bad connector between the house and the pole, and fixed it, so with luck that'll be the end of that.

Recently I've been reading Lapsing into a Comma by Bill Walsh, a language snob with whom I apparently have a lot in common. The book is part style guide, part collection of rants, and some of his rants sound very familiar. :-) We do have some areas of disagreement -- he believes terminal punctuation must go inside close quotes, and he has a problem with "email" -- but it's an entertaining read so far. And his case against "email" (he thinks it should be "e-mail") does make a good point: no other letter-hyphen-word construct in the language has lost its hyphen ("A-frame", "t-shirt", "D-day", "C-section", etc).

fiannaharpar and lrstrobel had the baby today. (Well, she had the baby and he watched. :-) ) I'm an honorary guy when it comes to stuff like this, so you'll have to go elsewhere for all the stats and stuff.

This weekend the local SCA group is having a Viking-themed event, so I got out my old Viking clothes and discovered a problem with the caftan I want to wear. But lefkowitzga had announced that she was having people over for sewing tonight, so I went over and she not only showed me how to fix it, but did most of the work. Gail is a real sweetie!

It began to snow while we were there. On the way home I was trying to figure out if the roads were much worse than they looked or if my car had developed a sudden malady. Based on some of the other traffic, I'm guessing the former (though it wasn't bad to walk on). This morning it was 45 degrees or so and now there's an inch of snow on the ground and more coming down. Wacky.

Several days ago I cancelled the digital cable, dropping back down to the $13/month ultra-basic service that doesn't use a converter box. I expected the signal from the box to go dead, but so far it hasn't. In fact, I'm still getting all the high-end channels, but the on-screen TV guide and the ability to punch a channel into the remote and go directly there are gone. (So I can get whatever's on, e.g., channel 237 if I want to go there stepwise.) So they've obviously made some change to the service, but not the change I expected. The signal is also better coming through the box than through the raw line (and a little worse on the raw line than it was with the digital cable service), so I'll leave the box hooked up until they come to get it on Sunday (or it goes dead). I wonder if this means that there is hardware that I can add to the line to simply enhance the signal, without violating the customer agreement. UPN seems to be especially bad without the box, for some odd reason.

The cable company has a nice little scam of sorts. When I called to change the service they wouldn't talk to me unless I supplied an account number, which I didn't have with me. They didn't need such confirmation to add services to the account, but they do to remove them -- and, of course, you pay for them until you successfully remove them. So they got an extra day out of me; oh well.

Gail and I decided not to go to the event in Buffalo, so I invited her for Shabbat lunch instead. (She would have joined me for services first if the person in the other half of her duplex hadn't been very loud for a very long time in the wee hours of the morning.) We had a pleasant meal and gab session. It's been too long since we just sat around and shot the breeze.

(I'll write more about Shabbat stuff later, separately.)

In the evening we went to Ralph and Lori's party, which was a lot of fun! It was a good crowd of people, and the food, as usual, was fantastic. (I loved the curried gouda.) At one point I picked up a cookie-like object and, after sampling, said to someone "I have no idea what I'm eating, but this is really good". (I know that I can trust Ralph and Lori with food, so it's safe to pick up random food and eat it.) Lori described the recipe to me later. It was the buttersctch-orange candy.

I had one surreal moment when someone walked up to me and said "Hi Monica - do you remember me?" (I hate it when people ask that. There's no diplomatic way to say "I have no clue who you are", so I don't try for diplomacy. :-) ) This person was a co-worker at CGI, the first company I worked for after college. I left there in 1988. I still don't know what she actually did there; she had such strong memories that I felt odd asking something that would demonstrate that I really didn't remember any of this. I know she was not an engineer (I think I remember all the engineers anyway) because she talked about "you engineers". She seemed like a friendly-enough person, and apparently she now lives across the street from Ralph and Lori so I'll probably see her in the future.

There was one guest who was quite clearly not safe to drive home, so Dani and I tried to give him a ride. (We could have each driven a car to his house, so his car wouldn't be stranded.) He was very firm in his refusal and we didn't want to make a scene, but I worried that ultimately the hosts were going to end up in a show-down with him. I've since heard that someone else prevailed and he accepted a ride, which is good.

Today after a leisurely brunch we mostly finished shopping for my relatives. (There's always something you can't do via mail.) We also bought a desk for me; we went back to the second-hand room at one of the stores and they had something perfectly reasonable that's already assembled, so I don't have to do the IKEA-esque thing. :-) (Well, I was going to cave in and pay someone to do it.) And it's not expensive. It's a little beat up, but it's perfectly functional and I don't need fancy. I just need a writing surface with drawers. It'll be delivered a week from Monday; with luck the contractor will be done in that room by then, and then I can start carrying stuff upstairs. Yay.

Ralph and Lori gave us a copy of the Dungeon Master's Guide as a Chanukah present, and while we were in Borders today we decided to complete the initial set and pick up a Monster Manual. This is strongly influenced by my character's plans for Polymorph Self; it's time to peruse some of the options. :-)

Tonight I baked cookies for the choir dinner tomorrow. I was trying something new (but safe-new, not completely-untested-new), and it came out pretty well. Of course I had to perform quality control. :-)

It's been a hectic week at work, due largely to our lack of committed, firm process for software releases -- or rather, the inability of the engineers (thus far) to prevent requests for a "quick and dirty snapshot -- just a beta" from going somewhere. We will discuss this next week. (I think I was finally able to impress on the right person, on Friday, that we are not just making accelerated progress -- we are doing stuff that we will have to undo later, and that has a cost.) The real answer here is to have frequent quasi-releases, where we go through the freeze/QA/archive process even if it never leaves the building. If we do this every month, then when someone nees the "latest and greatest" he is at most out of date by a couple weeks. Part of the problem this week was that it's been too long since the last release -- but until recently, the next release was not a priority.

Tuesday night was the D&D game. It was fun. My character is now in negotiations with an intelligent weapon, of all things. This should be fascinating. (Only two party members are even elligble to wield the weapon, due to size and class restrictions. The other one is not interested. In general, if my character, a sorceror, is in melee then something has gone horribly wrong, but if something goes horribly wrong there's something to be said for having a good weapon. But this might not be what the weapon had in mind.)

Wednesday night's West Wing was fun. I think a lot of the quality of that show is in the writing (as with B5); this show seems to be targetting more of a "thinking" crowd than many shows out there. Keep it up, guys.

I'm not sure how I feel about the "Rapture-esque" Twilight Zone this week.

Saturday night we went to a "wine and dessert" party hosted by Sharon and Eliot. It was a very pleasant evening and I got to see some people I don't see often, like Christine, Greg, and Jody. I also met some new people who were interesting to talk with. Ralph and Lori were there, too, as was my co-worker Jake (with his SO Erin -- not sure which of them is the connection to which of Sharon or Eliot). Sharon and Eliot have wide social circles.

If you're in the SCA and interested in persona development, check out sca_persona. It's an interesting experiment.

Tonight was fiannaharpar and lrstrobel's wedding. The local SCA choir was doing processional and recessional pieces, combined with their church choir. It went well, and all reports are that we sounded good. The accoustics of the place helped; so did having about 30 singers. (Our choir has around a dozen; the rest were from their church.)

Ray and Jenn had asked me to sing a psalm (in Hebrew). I ended up doing Psalm 29 ("Havu l-Adonai...") I was worried that the melody I know (which seems to be pretty common around here) would be too boring/repetitive, but when I tried it out on Ray and Jenn they liked it so we went with it. It went well, and I got a lot of compliments at the reception. I am also pleased that I did not need to use a microphone to make myself heard in the largish room. (Accoustics, support, and, um, natural loudness at work...)

Dani helpfully pointed out that most of the people there didn't actually know Hebrew, so I could have sung anything I wanted and no one would be the wiser (except lefkowitzga, I pointed out). Don't worry, Ray and Jenn; I didn't listen to him. :-) (Actually, we had this conversation at the reception.)

I got to meet celebrin at the reception. It's always nice to put faces and names together! I also got to meet Alper, finally. (I hope we didn't scare him off.) I also saw sk4p there; he read Psalm 27 (in English) during the ceremony. I don't think I've seen him since Don's new year's party last year, so it was nice to see him again. rani23 seemed to have the food under control. (Thanks for the fruit and veggies to offset the sugar!)

Wednesday my rabbi and I started on Tractate B'rachot. It was great! My rabbi absolutely rocks. Maybe I'll write more about that later. Anyway, partly because of this tractate, I decided that it was time to re-read Donin's To Pray as a Jew (well, reread some and skim other parts), so I started to do that this afternoon. My rabbi is right: the part about the evening (ma'ariv) service originally being optional, and never requiring a chazan's repetition of the Amidah, is in there. I missed it when I first read the book about four years ago.

My rabbi is on his way to Jerusalem for some sort of solidarity mission. I pray he returns safely. I'm somewhat saddened to realize that if he were going to DC a week ago, I wouldn't have made that comment.

Shabbat: pleasant and undemanding.

Sunday we visited a high school friend and her husband. This is someone with whom I was close 25 years ago -- but we basically have nothing in common now. I am not especially interested in a relationship with them, but she is with me so I've been going along with it. And this time they did not try to convert me to Christianity by mis-quoting the bible like they did last time, so that was a success. We chatted mostly about things that do not matter, showed them how to put their computer into power-saver mode and how to hang up their modem without rebooting (!), and left a few hours later. (They have gotten onto the net, which means they are now believing and forwarding all the folklore and hoaxes that have been going around for years, but there didn't appear to be any way to really teach them there. Another time, perhaps.)

Sunday dinner was very nice. The secret of the chili was apparently cumin; I must remember this. (It was a turkey -- well, chicken in this case -- chili with beans and without tomatoes.) Yum!

After dinner we played "Beyond Balderdash". It appears that both my BS-detection and my BS-generation skills are only so-so; I finished in the middle of the pack. I thought my definition of "omphaloskepsis" as "medical name for an 'innie'" would trick more than one person. My explanation of "(somebody) Hodgson" as "discovered the form of lymphoma known as Hodgson's Disease" might have tricked some people if Dani hadn't had a very similar idea. Oops. It's a fun game.

We had an On the Mark practice today. It went well. Some of the songs that I remembered as being in not-so-good shape last practice worked well today. If we can keep this up, we're going to sound great at Darkover (Thanksgiving weekend).

I'd like to try to add a couple more new songs to the repertoire, just to keep our performances fresh for that audience. (This will be our twelfth year there, I think.) We have some possibilities for that. We've also been re-working some older songs ("Black Widows in the Privy" as ska is something I never would have thought of, but it sounds great!). And, of course, we do have the talents of two new members to show off, so that alone will make us different from last year.

Jenn asked me if I would sing at their wedding. I'm flattered. She specifically asked if I could sing any psalms in Hebrew, so I sang something for her today that she liked. Maybe the muse will strike and I will actually compose something for the occasion, but if not I have something to fall back on.

Friday night at services Rabbi Freedman talked about lashon hara -- usually translated as gossip, but it's really a more general form of hurtful speech. (The phrase literally means "evil language".) He spoke well. This is something I have tried to pay attention to over the last few years (not always successfully), but it's rare that I hear about it from the pulpit. I don't know why that is.

I have finally gotten to the end of a Shabbat with the melody for a particular song still intact. Now I can write it down. It's a lovely "Hashiveinu" that I've heard perhaps half a dozen times over the last few years. Not that I have real occasion to sing it (other than at my synagogue when it's being led), but I still wanted to get it recorded somehow just so I wouldn't lose it.

Tomorrow afternoon I will rebuild the piece of the sukkah that went missing. (I went to Home Depot Thursday for parts.) I think I have a better way to build it than what I did before; we'll see. Then later we'll have dinner with friends before sundown, and then it will be Yom Kippur.

To my Jewish friends: tzom kal (have an easy fast) and g'mar chatima tova (may the final seal be for good).

Our first-season West Wing DVDs have arrived from England or Australia or wherever we ordered them from. I have hopes that the player that can read them will be along shortly.

Woo hoo. I just noticed that Schoolhouse Rock has been compiled on DVD! Gotta get that. The release date was just a couple days ago, and I bumped into it by chance. I've been loosely compiling an Amazon order for a while and they're currently doing free shipping, so this seems a good time to run up the credit card.

For those who care: my "last few days" entry on Tuesday has spawned a small discussion on how some Jews go about deciding what music from Christiandom is ok to sing. (The specific context is choral music.)

Remember my high-school friend Lori and her husband, Daniel-the-annoying-evangelist? They have email now. I'm not sure they and the net are ready for each other; they had very few computer instincts when last we discussed the subject. They're also pregnant, and they want to get together with us real soon to catch up, and there'll be a baby shower in a few weeks, and... I'm not sure I'm ready for elevated levels of contact with them. I think the once-a-year model worked pretty well, actually.

Shabbat was pleasant. It's actually been a few weeks since I've been to my synagogue for Friday night -- last week was the shabbaton, the week before was an SCA event, and the week before that I went to a different synagogue. Saturday morning was its usual fulfilling service. We ended up talking at Torah study about Christian/Jewish differences on the subject of intermediaries, motivated by the discussion in Leviticus about the temple priests making attonement for you after you bring the korban.

Saturday afternoon was an On the Mark practice, the first one with our new members (Ray and Jenn). We had previously had a meeting, but this was the first time we actually made music. I think it's going well; there are all sorts of interesting possibilities with the current members and repertoire. I hope that Ray and Jenn will speak up if there's something in the repertoire that they really don't like; I worry about the steamroller effect. I need to remember to actually send out detailed email with the to-do list for next time; I didn't do that last time and I needed to.

Sad commentary on the technological age: it appears that the most effective way for me to keep the repertoire list up to date is to use index cards. Yes, actual physical paper. I used to keep the list on the computer, but we don't have a computer at practices, so I'd print it out, start scribbling on it, never quite get around to making updates, and then decide that the accumulated scribblings were the permanent record. Which works fine until you've added so much stuff that you no longer have an organized list. (This isn't just a list of titles; it's title, who plays/sings what part, what keyboard settings we use (if the keyboard is involved), what key we do it in, etc.) (No, I don't have a Palm or equivalent yet. I'm waiting for some improvements to the user interface.)

On Saturday we also got a call from Marion, who was in town with her husband Fred at the last minute. We got together on Sunday afternoon. It was good to see them again. Fred is still allergic to cats, but he seemed to be coping pretty well with Erik's desire to curl up on his lap. (Cats always gravitate toward those who least want their presence.) They of course knew about the cats in advance, so maybe this involved drugs.

Fred was delighted that we had a good solid storm while they were visiting. We even went out on the front porch to watch it. He says they don't get real storms in Seattle.

After they left Dani and I headed off to Sunday dinner at Ralph and Lori's. Dinner was tasty and the games afterwards were fun. I would have had more fun if I had realized that my allergies were kicking into gear before we left; I sneezed through dinner and some of the gaming before discovering that Lori and I take the same prescription allergy medicine. Things got better after that.

The allergies are being weird this year, in part due to the random warm days early on and in part due to it never getting and staying cold enough last winter to kill everything off. I have summer allergies, not spring allergies. Except this year. But it's random; I haven't taken any more allergy medicine since last night, and I'm fine.

The folks at Tree of Life would like me to attend their annual meeting next week (even though I'm not a member there). They're doing something to thank their guest cantors and random other people who've helped out over the last year. Cool.

Friday night at services I ran into Peggy, who I haven't seen in a while. She was there specifically to add a name to the misheberach list. (This is a list of people who are seriously ill, who are mentioned in a special prayer for healing.) Her son is in high school, and earlier in the week three of his classmates were involved in a nasty auto accident. One was treated and released, one has several broken bones, and the third was in a coma and was not expected to recover. Her son is good friends with that third person, and she was pretty upset. (In the small-world department, one of the other two -- I do not know which one -- used to live in our house. We bought the house from her father.)

The accident happened in Ohio and the girl's family is there now. Peggy said that she was planning to pick up some food for the family and go there Saturday. I told her I had a ton of food that had been intended to be a Shabbat meal for guests who never arrived (see previous entry), and would she like to take that for them? I felt a little weird offering what amounts to leftovers, but I also wanted to use a "mitzvah meal" for a (different) mitzvah if I could, rather than just declaring leftovers. (This may sound completely bizarre, but that was my thinking.) And if my doing this might cause her to not have to violate Shabbat by cooking (or going to a grocery store), so much the better. And the food is kosher (I don't know the family so don't know if they care). So she came to my house after services and chatted with Dani for a few minutes while I packed up food for her to take.

Sadly, we learned today that the girl died early this morning. Two people who are not regulars at our morning minyan came today, a mother and her high-school daughter (also a friend of the girl who died). She was really, really shaken.

(No one seems to know how the accident happened. The other two people in the car don't remember it yet. I don't know if there was another vehicle.)

Between this and another recent death that affected several people in our morning minyan, we didn't actually have Torah study today. the rabbi thought it was more important for everyone to just be together, rather than having half the people leave while the other half study. This was the right call. Vayikra will still be there next week.


About a month ago a new person started showing up to the morning minyan regularly. I'd guess that he's about 20, so I asked him if he was a student. He's not; he's working (in a store, I think). He is currently trying to get his employer to keep a promise that he says was made about not making him work on Shabbat and Yom Tov, but it's not resolved yet. He volunteered this as if he expected to be criticized for violating Shabbat, but I don't think anyone in our minyan would do that. Especially as it's obvious that he cares and feels like he's stuck.

I gather that his family does not live in Pittsburgh. He said that his parents have disowned him, but he didn't elaborate and I didn't ask. He seems like a nice person. Young and maybe uncertain about his future, but friendly and reasonable.

This morning I noticed a change in his appearance since last I saw him: he's now wearing a kipa (aka yarmulke) and tzitzit (tallit katan, I mean).[1] The latter is unusual in non-Orthodox circles. I'm happy that he's comfortable enough with his religion to be able to wear these things, and comfortable enough with our minyan that he doesn't think people will question him. I guess we've made a good impression on him in the few weeks since he essentially apologized for going to work after minyan.

This morning he brought a friend who is about the same age. She also seems to be very nice; I think we'll be seeing her again.

[1] A tallit katan is an undergarment with fringes on the corners (the same types of fringes as those on the prayer shawl, the tallit gadol). If you've seen men (typically in black suits) with fringes hanging out from around the waist, that's this garment. The fringes are worn out because you're supposed to see them (and thereby remember the commandments -- sort of like a portable mezuzah). This is a rule for men only, and I've never seen a woman wear one.